Will DNA Analysis Make Politics Less of a Mind-Killer?
I wrote an article for h+ predicting that the rapid fall in the cost of gene sequencing will allow U.S. voters to learn much about presidential candidates’ DNA. The candidates won’t be able to stop this because:
humans shed so much DNA that unless a politician lived in a plastic bubble he couldn’t shield his DNA from prying eyes. Politicians will probably pass laws making it a crime to involuntarily disclose a politician’s genetic traits. But since it would take only one person to leak the information onto the Internet, and given that any serious candidate for President will have many enemies, candidates’ genomes will undoubtedly become public.
DNA analysis has a decent chance of reducing political bias by providing objective information about candidates. If, for example, 70% of the variation in human intelligence is determined by identified genes then DNA analysis would reduce disagreements among informed voters over a candidate’s intelligence.
This idea really represents a huge misunderstanding of what kinds of things actually drive political disagreement.
Do you know anyone who would vote for a very smart candidate they strongly disagreed with instead of a fairly smart candidate they completely agreed with?
Do you typically change your own mind whenever you meet a much smarter person who disagrees with you?
Have you ever seen anti-intellectualism drive voters away from the obviously smarter of two candidates?
The whole point of PitMK is that political disagreement puts us in a situation where our biases are even less under control than usual. DNA testing that shows one candidate to be likely (but not certain) to be smarter than the other one isn’t going to do a damn thing about that.
The media spent a lot of time discussing Palin’s intelligence presumably because many voters cared about it.
I agree that “political disagreement puts us in a situation where our biases are even less under control than usual” but additional information could reduce these biases. The situation under PitMK isn’t hopeless.
Lots of Republicans thought that Bill Clinton was a sociopath. Let’s say he was. PitMK would make it challenging for Democrats to see this. But if an analysis of Clinton’s genes showed that a child born with his genes had a 70% chance of being a sociopath then I doubt Clinton would have won the Democratic party nomination.
Not because the voters cared about her intelligence per se, but because demonstrating that she’s a moron constitutes an argument the Republicans can’t easily defend against. It was pretty obvious that Palin isn’t exceptionally intelligent—far more obvious for a typical voter than any DNA test could be—and still the debates weren’t any less irrational than usually.
I would also expect soon emergence of social defense mechanisms against such tests. Saying that somebody is probably an idiot based on her genetic background is like saying somebody is probably a criminal based on his being black. You can expect counterarguments like
people are born equal and nobody is responsible for his genes
discrimination based on DNA test is unfair, because there will necessarily be some non-morons harmed by such a practice
well, even if it is 99% sure that she’s a moron, there still is a 1% chance that you can’t neglect, so the whole probability argument is worthless
People struggle to get Bayesian probabilistic arguments to work in courts where many bias avoiding mechanisms are already employed. In politics, even the most obvious everyday rational arguments don’t work regularly. To expect a fairly abstract argument based on numerical probabilities obtained by a method which almost nobody understands to be persuasive in a heated political debate is naïve.
Also worth noting: A candidate who has views I disagree with is even MORE dangerous if they’re intelligent. Genes demonstrating intelligence would only really affect things at the primaries, where you’re choosing which candidate will best represent your views.
When WikiLeaks released all of their data, almost nobody in the American voting population read it. Nearly everyone who did so was in the media, an intellectual, or a member of a political organization (governments, activists, terrorists, etc). Gene sequencing would likely be similar. The amount of data pulled out of a candidate’s gene sequence would be so large that the only information about it the voting public got would be what the different political parties’ ad campaigns wanted to get out there. Fox News would report every unfavorable feature they could find about democrats, MSNBC would do the same for republicans. The Mind Killer would be as strong as ever.
I don’t think this would apply to genes greatly predisposing a candidate to being a sociopath. (The h+ article focuses on these kinds of genes.)
If, hypothetically, Sarah Palin was identified as having genes that made it 70% likely that she was a sociopath, it would get reported by CNN. Bill O’Reilly would yell about how it’s easy to tell that Sarah Palin is not a sociopath if you actually spend five minutes with her, rather than getting all your information filtered by the liberal media. Liberal groups would yell about how this confirmed all of their suspicions that Sarah Palin was a lying manipulator. Conservative tea partiers would make comments about “liberal evolutionist scientists” trying to discredit an American hero. More contemplative conservatives would point to this as an example of an innocent woman being discriminated against by immoral technologies, built by scientists who were “playing god”.
I originally wrote Barack Obama, but many liberals are frustrated with him, so I decided to write the scenario with a more polarizing figure. The point is, no matter how serious of well backed up the science is, there is no situation I can think of where political instincts wouldn’t be able to reduce the reasoning abilities of the average voter down to the level of a chimpanzee in a poo-fight.
If this sort of genetic testing existed, then politicians with very bad genes would never make it through the presidential primaries; they’d be filtered out before it got to partisans spinning or ignoring the evidence.
That is a good point. The essay was written about how DNA testing would change the mind-killing aspect of politics, but we probably should consider what effect it would have on just plain politics. Probably, if a lawyer came to the local political party and said that he was interested in running for some local regional office, and her DNA analysis said that she was likely to be a sociopath, the party would be less inclined to support him. Hopefully, DNA testing might make the quality of the candidates that reach higher levels of office a bit higher. There would probably be some benefits, but I doubt that it would help the mind-killer.
If you don’t think mindkilling sets in until the general election, then you didn’t actually follow the 2008 Democratic Primary (among other primaries, but it was on display in an extreme way in that particular case).
Also, in the specific case of sociopathy, I think that in response to a bad genetic test, the candidate would have an FMRI to measure the white matter in the amygdala, give an interview for the Hare Psychopathy test, and present any other confounding evidence that comes to hand, and then the debate would proceed much as MinibearRex suggests. Partisans would simply selectively weight the tests that supported their pre-existing intuitions.
No.
I posted the one word answer because I thought it was true and funny, and I wanted to see whether I could get some karma points that way.
However, I do have some reasons for thinking so. As some folks have said upthread, what genes mean is highly subject to interpretation, and motivated interpretation is part of what makes politics such a pleasure.
It occurs to me that if the DNA of politicians were studied, there might be gene complexes to be found which relate to some combination of good sense and political effectiveness. In the optimistic assumption that people could agree on what the former means, DNA could actually be politically useful. Maybe. Unless there’s a confounding factor like one gene combination being better in good times and another being better for dealing with hard, fast-moving problems, at which point the estimates get very challenging again.
Pretend that someone develops a genetic test for sociopaths. To test the test researchers look at 100 sibling pairs, and for each pair one but not both siblings have been diagnosed as sociopaths. The genetic test, let’s assume, does extremely well in identifying the sociopaths. Would you claim that this result is, as you say, “highly subject to interpretation”?
People would assuredly argue about whether whatever definition of sociopath being used was describing something real.
I doubt the barrier is actually identifying genes. Most genes that affect intelligence are probably not a clear-cut win for any of the alleles, but are trade-offs for different modes of thinking. Plus of course it’s questionable how much of an effect genetic intelligence has on a President’s success.
Furthermore, even if we could determine a numerical intelligence from DNA that worked like IQ, but combined all factors into an unambiguous ranking, and these were published on the Internet about every politician ever, I doubt it would affect votes all that much.
If, for example, Sarah Palin had many identified “high IQ genes” I doubt that the mainstreem media would have been able to characterize her as a dullard.
This study claims to “unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation.”
At some point it was pointed out that George W. Bush DID have a higher IQ than John Kerry. As far as I know, this did not affect anyone’s judgment of him in the slightest. The people who liked him still liked him. The people who thought he was an idiot still thought he was an idiot in the ways that actually mattered.
What I remember was that he had a higher college GPA...
He did, but they also both took military officer aptitude tests, which are essentially IQ tests. Bush took the Air Force one, Kerry took the Navy one- so you can’t compare scores directly- but it’s most likely that Bush had a slightly higher IQ.
Why would they not? Why shouldn’t they? Phenotype dominates genotype.
Yes, but PitMK makes it hard to judge phenotype.
Hard? Harder than trying to infer IQ from genes? Genes are great, but let’s not kid ourselves about how much one will be able to infer—a bad IQ test beats the most sophisticated attempt to infer from genes.
Perhaps not because of variations of individual IQ scores across time. Lots of people retake the IQ test known as the SATs hoping to get a better score.
PitMK being...?
This assumes no correlation between whether she’s a dullard and whether she sounds like one when she talks. I assume that this hypothetical non-dullard version of Sarah Palin would also not have been able to be characterized as a dullard because she wouldn’t have said all the things that she said, thereby appearing to anyone who was paying attention to be a dullard.
You seem to be implicitly accepting the left’s view of Palin. Many Republicans thought that the way she spoke indicated that she was smarter than Joe Biden.
OK, I will put my biases on display as an example of why the kind of thing you’re talking about doesn’t work. My political views are generally opposed to Sarah Palin’s in the context of US politics. If you told me that, despite the judgments I formed listening to her talk in public, there is genetic evidence that she is actually very smart and Joe Biden is very stupid, I would reply “Then I feel sorry for the good Lord. She sounded like a world-class idiot.” I think most people, mutatis mutandis, would respond similarly.
In other words, I doubt that our confidence in DNA evidence regarding things like intelligence (which, NB, is surely correlated only imperfectly with skill in governing, which is one of the points I was trying to make in my comment below), is going to trump things like political ideology and our own judgments of whether someone sounds smart or not when they talk.
Er, Biden’s pretty stupid. Palin’s pretty stupid too, but I only suspect Biden’s IQ is higher with about 60% confidence.
I know a lot about how Republicans think and was a Republican candidate for the Massachusetts State Senate. Many Republicans think that Palin is smarter than Biden.
If gene analysis could somehow tell us definitively that Sarah Palin had an IQ of 90 and Joe Biden had an IQ of 130, would that change your political opinions or your vote in the last election? Do you think it would change the opinion of a substantial number of Republicans?
I submit that this is actually a testable proposition. Sample 100 people from a country where English is taught well, but the political system is so different from the US that people are unlikely to have tribal predispositions to favor Democrats or Republicans (100 Singaporeans, maybe). Show them the Palin-Biden debate, and a couple of examples of each of them speaking impromptu. Then ask the respondents whom they think is more intelligent. How substantial a sum would you be willing to wager that Palin would win such a poll?
I understand that they hold that view, and I am not trying to argue in favor of my own opposing view. What I’m saying is that, inasmuch as I do hold an opposing view (which is also tied in with political ideology, identity politics, and so forth), I’m really unlikely to be persuaded to change my mind on the basis of DNA evidence for intelligence. And I’m arguing that nearly everyone is just like me in this respect (again, modulo their own political views).
Would learning that your favorite presidential candidate had genes predisposing him to being a sociopath make you less likely to vote for that candidate?
Yes, definitely.
It would, at least a bit. But I’d have to consider it alongside the other stuff I knew about the candidate. If some candidate had attained the office of, let’s say, the governor of a large state while reliably carrying out my policy preferences and not getting embroiled in a major scandal of some kind, I doubt I’d give much credence to the hypothesis that they’d controlled their sociopathic urges, biding their time until they were elected US President and then unleashed terror upon the populace. Also note that there are enough veto points within the structure of the US government to prevent any one person from carrying out Stalin-level genocide or whatever; your point would maybe stand a bit better if we were electing a dictator, but then, dictators don’t get elected.
Sometimes they do!
I guess they very occasionally do, and in that case, I would be somewhat more wary about voting for someone with this fabled 70%-chance-of-being-a-sociopath DNA test even if they otherwise had given me no particular cause for alarm. We’re not talking about a very common situation here, though.
Don’t the names Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung and Pol Pot cause you to think that something about power attracts the wrong kind of people.
Selection bias alert! One can’t become a Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung or Pol Pot without power in the first place, so even if potential megakillers were actually much less common among powerful people we would still expect disproportionately more megakillers among the powerful.
I believe this is a matter of some dispute.
A whole, whole, whole lot of people have held political power other than those guys, and with very few exceptions have restrained themselves from committing mass murder.
But the expect cost of a sociopath becoming the U.S. president is huge. Also, although I don’t agree with this, lots of people think that George Bush was a mass murderer.
How less likely would you be to vote for Sarah Palin if she turned out to be 70% likely to be a sociopath?
Much less.
Remember that time Steve Sailer dug up records that showed Bush’s IQ was probably higher than Kerry’s? Do you really think that would change any opinions?
There’s an important quote very applicable to this:
The Fourth Virtue: Evenness; Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Twelve Virtues of Rationality
I predict that the astonishing amount of objective evidence, both good and bad, that gene sequencing could provide will allow both sides, using the same data set, to build extremely formidable arguments for and against any candidate. The nature of the exposure of the information—by the candidate’s enemies—makes this even scarier, as they will comfortably get away with exposing only the worst of any given data set. I don’t suppose h+ would consider running a piece in opposition?
Here is the h+ contact information if you want to try:
http://hplusmagazine.com/contact-us/
I disagree with this on several different levels, both for claims regarding low intelligence and for claims regarding sociopathy.
Low intelligence is a trait that tends to produce a lot of easily discernible evidence, and a DNA test, like an IQ test, would be swamped by that other evidence. Let us accept arguendo the claim that George W. Bush has a higher IQ than John Kerry. In the absence of any other evidence to update on, this would be substantial evidence that Bush is more intelligent. In the context of ample other evidence (they have both said, written, and done many things of which there is public record), however, it is weak evidence for the claim that Bush in more intelligent than Kerry, and strong evidence for the claim that IQ is of limited utility as a proxy for practical intelligence (I think this holds even if one corrects for the fact that Bush intentionally dumbed down his public persona to achieve more populist appeal). The same would be true of a DNA test.
Lest I be accused of simply filtering intelligence through an ideological lens, let me note that between Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, two Republican politicians who have suffered similar media treatment, I perceive Bachmann to be both substantially further to the right and far more intelligent than Palin.
Beyond the evidentiary point, there is simply the fact that left to choose between a candidate likely to be not very effective at implementing policies one agrees with, and a candidate likely to be very effective at implementing policies one disagrees with, many people would choose the former.
Sociopathy is a different case from low intelligence, in that high-functioning sociopathy is very difficult to discern. That being said, not only do I not think think it clear that a DNA test suggesting a predisposition to sociopathy should negatively influence my view of a political candidate, I do not think it clear that Omega informing me that a candidate is, in fact, a sociopath should negatively influence my view of a candidate....
Nihilists don’t give a damn what happens to anyone. I wouldn’t want to vote for a nihilist, because I don’t want to give the power to declare nuclear war to someone who doesn’t really care if it happens etc.
Sadists enjoy inflicting suffering on others. I wouldn’t want to vote for a sadist, because I know that they would inevitably try to choose policies meant to reduce aggregate utility.
Sociopaths lack empathy, but are very good at manipulating people to think otherwise, for their own advancement and aggrandizement. In politics, their own advancement and aggrandizement would mean striving for re-election, and then the perks and prestige that come with being a former leader judged to have been successful. This means aiming for policies that actually enjoy public support and that are likely to be judged successful. In other words, while a virtue ethicist might object to a sociopath in principle, a consequentialist has little reason to expect a sociopath to act differently in office than any other politician. Why should one care if a leader lacks the ability to actually empathize with his citizens, if he has to act in ways that will lead people to believe that he does regardless?